Jul 29, 2024 05:14 PM IST
Ola Electric, about to launch its ₹5,500 crore IPO on August 2, had signed an agreement with MapMyIndia’s parent company for using its data, in June 2021
CE Info Systems, the parent company of MapMyIndia has alleged that Bhavish Aggarwal’s Ola has ‘copied’ its data for creating Ola Maps, according to a Forbes report, which added that a legal notice has also been sent by them to Ola. HT couldn’t independently verify the information.
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What are the specifics of MapMyIndia’s allegations against Ola Maps?
The allegations are that Ola Maps was built by caching and saving MapMyIndia’s data, and co-mingling and reverse engineering the licensed product, that was signed in 2021, according to the report, which cited the legal document.
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What was the agreement signed between Ola and MapMyIndia?
Ola Electric had signed an agreement with CE Info Systems for using its data in June 2021. However, CE Info Systems mentioned in the legal notice that co-mingling and reverse engineering were prohibited in the agreement and under the prevailing Intellectual Property laws.
All of this comes as Ola Electric gets ready to launch its ₹5,500 crore initial public offering (IPO) on August 2, with a price band of ₹72-76 a share, and with the anchor investors starting their biddings on August 1.
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Ola Maps was rolled out in early July this year after Ola stopped using Microsoft’s Azure following Microsoft-owned LinkedIn removing Ola founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal’s LinkedIn post on pronouns.
Bhavish Aggarwal at that time, wrote in a post on X shortly afterwards that moving to Ola Maps has brought Ola’s spending to zero, compared to the ₹100 crore the company was spending earlier when using Google Maps.